Occasional rantings about Dynamics CRM/365, Power BI, SharePoint, Office 365 and Azure cloud. Intrigued about how people collaborate and data driven decision making. Taking the first small steps in machine learning. Putting all of the above in practical use to help companies "embrace" their customers

Thursday, May 11, 2017

When files are attached/linked to Dynamics 365 records, they are stored in the CRM database which will have an impact on licensing cost depending of how much this functionality is being used. In Dynamics 365, 10 GB of storage is by default allocated to all CRM databases - for all organizations in the tenant) and 5GB is accrued per 20 full-users which are being licensed. (For more details see the Dynamics 365 Enterprise Edition Licensing guide). It is however possible to purchase additional database storage at roughly 4 EUR/GB/month. So if you accumulate 100 GB of files/documents per year – the cost might quickly rise – listed below is a rough estimate for 3 years.

Required storage

Yearly cost

Year 1

100 GB

€ 4.800

Year 2

200 GB

€ 9.600

Year 3

300 GB

€ 14.400

There are a however a number of options to externalize these documents/file blobs outside of the CRM databases and save money:

Use SharePoint Online as document storage – see Using SharePoint Online to store Dynamics CRM Online Documents for more details. This is the preferred solution if you also need to leverage SharePoint features such as document metadata, authoring/editing of Office documents, version management, etc… From a user perspective, this might however be a way of working which is not as smooth as expected.

The Attachment Management solution is an add-on feature to dynamics 365 CRM Online to manage notes and email attachments using Azure blob storage. Attachment Management not only enables business users to optimize use of CRM Online storage but it also offers additional optional features using web resources such as multiple files upload with drag and drop support as well as a web resources which allows to list all notes and email attachments in grid format, with download and preview of these attachment.

Figure 1. Screenshot of upload files control with drag and drop support

Menu item for "Azure Blob Storage Settings" did not appear underneath Settings>Extensions – you can however manually add it through customization

Preview of documents within the grid listing does not seem to work correctly as visible in figure 2 above.

You also have to keep in mind that if you already have some existing attachments in Dynamics 365 (online), you will have to write some code to move them to Azure blob storage in the same way as the current solution does since this is not supported in the current version.